AMD has announced an official price cut for the Radeon R9 280, pulling it down from $279 to $249.

In case you missed it earlier, the AMD Radeon R9 280 was announced back in March and it is pretty much a rebrand of the Radeon HD 7950. It is based on AMD's 28nm Tahiti GPU, packs 1792 Stream Processors, 112 TMUs and 32 ROPs, 3GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 384-bit memory interface and works at 827MHz base GPU and 933MHz GPU Boost clocks while memory is set at 5000MHz, at least when it comes to those that follow AMD's reference design.

While it officially launched with a $279 price tag, AMD has now dropped it by $30, putting it smack in the middle between the R9 280X, priced at US $299 and the R9 270X, priced at US $199. This price also puts the R9 280 in direct competition with Nvidia's GTX 760 graphics card, which also sells for $249.

AMD has launched yet another Tahiti card. The R9 280 is basically a rebranded HD 7950 Boost, it is almost identical, apart from slightly higher clocks.

The card has 1792 shaders, 112 texture units and 32 ROPs. The core clock is unclear, but the boost clock is 933MHz. The HD 7950 was clocked at 850MHz, with a boost clock of 925MHz - so it should be close. The memory clock was not changed, 1250MHz or 5000MHz effective.

The R9 280 delivers 3344GFLOPS at boost clocks, while the reference HD 7950 maxes out at 3315GFLOPS. In terms of pricing, the release MSRP is $279, which does not sound too good. The HD 7950 launched a year and a half ago at $330 and the "new" R9 280X was released at $299.

The sad truth is that most consumers can't get an R9 280X for $299. Tahiti cards are in high demand thanks to a number of factors and much of the demand appears to be coming from the cryptocurrency mining crowd. Bitcoins can't be mined using Radeons, but altcoins based on Scrypt can only be mined with GPUs. Here at Fudzilla we're not huge fans of GPU mining. Working conditions in unregulated Litecoin mines are terrible and we're told many brave miners die in overclocking-related incidents. It's a bad time to be a canary, too.

The altcoin mining craze has been pushing up Radeon prices for the past couple of months and high demand could explain AMD's decision to price the 280 at $279. On the other hand, AMD might just have a good sense of hUMA, so it wants to sell the 280 for $280 - it's easier to remember that way.

In addition to the recently announced Radeon R7 250X graphics card, AMD is allegedly preparing two more graphics cards, the R7 265 and the R9 280, based on the Curacao GPU and the well known Tahiti GPU.

The information comes from Chinese VR-Zone and the R7 265 will be based on Curacao GPU, one behind both the R9 270 and the R9 270X graphics card, and not the expected Bonaire GPU which is behind the R7 260 series graphics cards. We will be looking at a cut-down version of the Curacao GPU which will end up with 1024 Stream Processors, 64 TMUs, 32 ROPs and a 256-bit memory interface paired up with 2GB of GDDR5 memory, most likely. The GPU should end up clocked at around 900MHz while the memory will work at 4.8GHz.

The Radeon R9 280 will be based on the good old Tahiti GPU and it will be quite similar to the previously release HD 7950 graphics card. It will pack 1792 Stream Processors, 112 TMUs, 32 ROPs and a 384-bit memory interface paired up with 3GB of GDDR5 memory. The GPU is expected to be clocked at over 800MHz while memory should end up at 5.0GHz.

The R7 265 is expected to fit well in the lower mid-range segment with a price tag of around US $149 to US $159 while the R9 280 should fit below R9 280X which is still a US $299 graphics card, at least on paper, so hopefully, we will see the R9 280 at around US $249.

Unfortunately, the precise date of the release is not revealed but we suspect that we might hear something about them around Cebit show in March.